Road to Italy: Mixing Business And Pleasure

It’s been a while but I finally get to don my travelling boots and get the hell outta dodge! To say that I’m excited is a bit of an understatement. This is going to be one awesome adventure, and adventure is certainly the best term to describe it.

Now I am not only excited because I will be cycling around my entire life for the next 2-3 months, but I am making an extreme effort to make sure I don’t just treat this as a holiday.

Poker will be playing a vital role along the way.

A Very Rough Plan

When you get down to the nitty gritty of it all, this trip is one for the budget enthusiasts amongst you. I am carrying my house, my food and my clothes on my back (or bike if you want to be pedantic about it). When it comes to finances, I have been relatively strict on myself over the last few months and have managed to save a mere £500 or so which will be transferred into Euros in due course. I am also planning on taking any money over $1000 from my Pokerstars account which could be another £0-£500 depending how the rest of the month goes.

And that’s it.

£500-£1000 for a possible 3 month trip across Europe.

Easy.

Now I literally have no idea how much any of this is going to cost. We plan on wild camping a huge chunk of our trip and so any costs will literally come down to food and tourist expenses. And of course, I hope to be making money along the way…

A Sign of Things to Come

Ok so that will be a bit of a stretch. I have no idea about internet facilities and obviously we won’t exactly be staying in luxury 5-star resorts along the way. But new EU rules regarding mobile roaming data are coming in from the 15th June so that could play a vital role in how much poker I get to play. Also, I am not taking a heavy laptop or anything, so if I do get the chance to play then it will be solely played on a tablet, with no HUD and thus I will drop down in stakes and just treat every single player as an unknown.

It’s not ideal, but it’s better than nothing.

The majority of my work will actually be off-table study. I aim to load my tablet and ebook reader with various poker material including recorded videos of me playing so I can assess my play on the road. I want to make sure I actually have a plan of action in terms of what I decide to study. I won’t have access to any Holdem Manager software so hand history reviews are out of the question. In my head, the best use of my time will be focusing on the math side of poker. It has never been my strong point so this would be a great chance to really try and dig my heels into it a little bit more. However, after cycling 6 hours a day, in the blistering heat of Italy, maybe sitting down to do maths won’t seem so appealing. Time will tell but I aim to focus a dedicated 20 hours a week on full blown study. That means actively learning and keeping track of my hours. Whether that is an hour of active video review at lunch time on one of our break stops, or if that’s a couple of hours of deep math inside my tent in some random forest somewhere.

Dedication will be key.

Funded By Pokerstars

So anyone who has followed this blog over the last year or so will know by now that it has been an incredibly hard year for me and my progress. Slow would be putting mildly, non-existent would be apt.

But as I have continued to slog through the ups and down, determined to find the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow, I have managed to build up a little something on the side.

Pokerstars coins to be exact.

And I traded in those coins for £200 worths of Amazon vouchers. And from that, my brand new kit has been bought.

My Brand New Kit

A new roll mat, solar panel charger, walkie talkies, battery pack, first aid kit, head torch, cycle multitools and a few other bits and bobs.

It’s certainly not life-changing but the idea that a lot of my equipment on this trip has been paid for by me playing poker is just another step in the right direction.